End Game

When convicted felon, Donald Trump, and his master, indicted war criminal and fraudster, Benjamin Netanyahu, cooked up their scheme to evict the Palestinians from Gaza, they were simply articulating the original aims of the Zionist project.

Given that the US is now putting the squeeze on both Egypt and Jordan to accept millions of refugees, there is no doubt that the West Bank will be ethnically-cleansed as well.

But where did Zionism come from? Well, Theodor Herzl is widely regarded as the father of the movement and his thoughts are laid out in a book, originally titled “Der Judenstaat”. The is usually translated as “The Jewish State”, but it would be more accurate to interpret it as “The Jews’ State”.

This is important, because Herzl was not a religious man and his vision for the Zionist state was not of some rabbinical university, where Hebrew scholars would argue the minutiae of the Torah. Instead, he just wanted a place where the Jewish demographic would be the majority; would form the government; would be in charge.

In fact, he had no fixed notions of where exactly this state would be. Early ideas included Argentina or even colonizing a part of the USA. He also promoted Zionism very explicitly as a colonial project., Back then (19th century), any country with ambitions had colonies around the world and acquiring someone else’s land was de rigueur. He hoped the colonial powers would support his plan.

To be honest, Zionism was not a popular idea when Herzl first began touting it. It was difficult to promote a concept that had so little tangible details. This all changed in 1917.

Then the British Foreign Secretary, Author Balfour, made out his infamous declaration where he basically gave the nod to the idea of setting up this Jews’ State in Mandate Palestine. What is not so well known is that the person he made the declaration to was another noted Zionist, Lionel Walter Rothschild.

The Rothschilds are a famous banking dynasty that trace their roots back to Mayer Amschel Bauer. Born in 1744, he had his sights set on greater things. His first step was to change his rather prosaic last name (Bauer means Farmer in German). Not being one to steal someone else’s pedigree, he named the family after the red shield hanging over the door of his house – red shield being “rot schild” in German.

The Rothschilds became stinking rich and Walter, trading as the Second Baron Rothschild was apparently so rich that he had zebras instead of horses pulling his carriage! He proved to be a formidable ally in promoting Herzl’s dream.

The Balfour Declaration also provided serious impetus to the project. Now, not only was there an actual location for the state, there was the association with biblical Palestine where the twelve tribes of Israel once plied their trade.

But there was one teensy little problem.? Although a later Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, travelled the world with her mendacious slogan: “A land without a people for a people without a land”, there was a thriving population in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century. Ironically, given what was to come, the Muslim Arabs, the sizable Christian community and the smaller Jewish population lived harmoniously together. But the Jews were far from being the majority and gaining that majority became the concern of later Zionists, such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

Jabotinsky is renowned for his essay, originally written in Russian, called “The Iron Wall”. In this, he argues that no colonial adventure ever succeeded in taking over a country without massive pushback from the natives. So, the natives need to be expelled.

Although it might have lost something in translation, Jabotinsky’s section called “Zionism Moral and Just” shows something of the convoluted logic that we regularly see in successive Israeli governments. Jabotinsky writes:

“In the first place, if anyone objects that this point of view is immoral, I answer: It is not true: either Zionism is moral and just, or it is immoral and unjust. But that is a question that we should have settled before we became Zionists. Actually we have settled that question, and in the affirmative.

“We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not.

“There is no other morality.”

That reads to me like Zionism is right, because we say it’s right. Maybe it is this sort of thinking that convinces Netanyahu and his cronies that the Israeli Defence Force “is the most moral army in the world”.

As soon as the State of Israel was formed, the first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, executed Plan Dalet, where the native Palestinians were forcibly evicted from their land. The original intention was that Israel would get half of Mandate Palestine but, after Plan Dalet, the Israelis ended up with 77%.

But this forced expulsion was not without consequences. In 1956, then Israeli army chief of staff, Moshe Dayan, highlighted the injustice being done, at the graveside of a killed security officer:

“Let us not cast accusations at the murderers today. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza’s refugee camps, as before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property.”

Come 1967 and Israel managed to get the rest of it. Weirdly, they occupied the Palestinian territories, but did not annex them fully. At the time, no doubt, Israel was concerned about the optics and the policy of expulsion was replaced with occupation.

Yet, after decades of brutal persecution, the Palestinians have not left their homeland, so now we see expulsion back on the agenda. However, remember Moshe Dayan’s warning: With millions of displaced Palestinians camped in neighbouring countries, Israel will live in fear of reprisals.

Things would get dramatically worse though if the US takes ownership of the other occupied territories, particularly East Jerusalem. Will Trump order the Temple to be rebuilt? Then Jews around the world will tremble as the Christian Zionists set about converting the Jews before the Rapture.

All this looks like an end game, but for whom?

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